Image: Beate Meier It’s our fourth annual notifications post! Below, you’ll find information about creative writing acceptance, rejection and waitlist notifications; MA and low-res programs are included. We collect this information from Gradcafe. We cannot guarantee the data is 100 percent accurate as it is user submitted and unverifiable. Please let us know if a program is still notifying applicants, or if anything is inaccurate....

Photo Credit: Alfred Stieglitz, “The Steerage” It’s mid-December, which means it’s high tide in application season. A year ago, we were exactly where you are now. We spent our free time navigating unintuitively designed web portals for universities, editing our statements of purpose to be personal for each program, and tallying all the money we spent on application fees. We all shouldered the nauseating uncertainty of...

When I failed in my first attempt at MFA applications, my resolve to try again meant taking a critical look at myself and considering where I could improve. At first, it seemed daunting, because I had spent a lot of time on my applications. But then I began to consider not the quantity of work I had done, but methods I had used.

I’ve spent two months posting about literary magazine submissions here and here, and now it’s time to get back to the mission of this website. Now it’s time to discuss the MFA. Some of you will be figuring out which offers to take in the next month or so, and some of you are just beginning to research the whole process for applications...

Hey, Cady here. Just want to let you know I read the message boards. I’m active in one Facebook group for applicants, and I help moderate another. I am aware that every last one of you is panicked about the statement of purpose. I’ve been known to show my statement to people, but that’s not what I’m going to do here. I know this is...

Image: Chris Campbell I’ve talked briefly before about my application sample woes. A good portion of what ended up in my sample came from my junior year capstone project. I spent a year writing and revising poetry for it, and ended up with a nice looking chapbook, and some good to decent to bad poems. Everyone has a different strategy. Some applicants will submit things...

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I wish this post didn’t need to be written, but unfortunately, it’s a tumultuous time with regard to the future of funding for graduate students, including those pursuing an MFA. As many of you know, earlier this week, Republicans in the House passed a comprehensive tax bill, and last night, Republicans in the Senate passed a similar comprehensive tax bill in a 51-49 vote. The Senate and the House will now have to reconcile the differences in the two bills before creating a unified bill to pass on to President Trump, who will undoubtedly sign it into law. So how does this pertain to graduate students? Well, we’re not sure yet. The reason for this is because of a key difference between the tax bill passed by the House and that passed by the Senate. The provisions in the tax overhaul passed by the House would be detrimental for any graduate students in the United States receiving a tuition remission as part of their financial package (this is the case with most if not...

Interview

Image: Richard Hurd What is it like living in Madison? How far does your stipend go there living wise? Before moving here, I never really thought about Wisconsin at all, had vague ideas about beer and cheese. But Madison itself is a small, cute town (little gingerbread houses and flowerbeds) with some big city aspects and lots of arts and music coming through. Easily...

For the next two months we’ll be asking some of our first year contributors to talk about the post application period and how they dealt with it last year. What did you do to get through the post application period? I was working at a dead-end job when I applied to MFA programs, and […]

For the next two months we’ll be asking some of our first year contributors to talk about the post application period and how they dealt with it last year. What did you do to get through the post application period? I was working at a dead-end job when I applied to MFA programs, and […]

Image: Edsel Little Note: Thank you to first year contributor J.R. Dawson for providing me with these questions! How does your residency work and how it is paced? Spalding University’s Low-Residency program offers several options students can complete while enrolled in the program. The option selected decides the time they will attend residency. Some students, like […]